


With your shield or on it

by historymiss



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: F/F, Ultimate rare pair mode activate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-02-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:14:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22199191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: The Ninth has never been kind to those who don’t die when they’re supposed to.
Relationships: Aiglamene/Pelleamena Nonisvarius
Comments: 13
Kudos: 55





	1. Chapter 1

Aiglamene was never supposed to return to the Ninth.

Not alive, anyway. That was the bargain. You got your ticket away from Drearburh’s lonely cells, and when you came back, you had the good taste and sense to do it as a pile of newly-bleached bones, neatly arranged inside a box. It was the best any of them could hope for. Aiglamene wasn’t a Nigenad, or a Nonisvarius, or even a Nav. Only the second most valuable export of their lonely rock, after bone dust but before snow leeks. 

She was a body, a warm, whole one, another thin layer in the myriad arrayed against the Emperor’s enemies.

And, in the end, she failed.

Mortus greets her off the shuttle, his robe flapping out in the downdraft like a single black wing. He’s the only one, and Aiglamene strongly suspects it’s duty more than friendship that’s brought him there.

She drags herself down the ramp with her crutches, looks up at his face, as craggy and silent as a cliff.

“Heard you have a kid now.” 

Mortus nods. 

“A son. Ortus.”

It’s about as much as he’s ever said to her. 

“Seriously?” Aiglamene follows him into the bowels of Drearburh, towards the medical wing. “You can’t saddle him with that, the poor boy is going to hate you.”

Is that a chuckle? Deep down, at the edge of hearing? Aiglamene decides it is. She’s used to taking her victories where she can find them.

“He’s nearly old enough to start training. I’ll bring him to you, when you’ve recovered.”

Oh, yes. There it is. The reminder that no matter what happens in the medical wing, Aiglamene is staying here for good. The Ninth holds onto its own tight enough to choke, and she’s no exception.

Smiling thinly, she pushes open the door as Mortus effects a lumbering bow and shuffles off into the shadows of Drearburh. 

That is the last thing she remembers for a while, aside from the pain.

When Aiglamene comes to, lying in bed in a dingy ward whose mildewed hangings are more gray than white, she is not alone.

Pelleamena Nonisvarius, Reverend Mother of the Ninth, slim and severe as a knife, stands over her.

Aiglamene’s mouth feels like it’s been filled with cotton. She croaks something, reaches to the glass of water left on her bedside table. Pelleamena watches as she wets her lips, her eyes moving to follow the pulse and bob of Aiglamene’s throat. 

“So. You have returned to us.”

Aiglamene puts her glass down and takes a moment. This is the most concern Pelleamena has shown for her- well, ever.

“I didn’t have a choice.” Her voice is still a rasp, and she doesn’t quite have the courage to look down at her leg yet. Pelleamena’s mouth draws itself into a hard, elegant line.

“We heard about the battle, yes. The letters to their families have been delivered, the bones made ready for their niches. You can see them, in time. If you like.”

This is so very tone deaf, so crass, so _Ninth_ , that Aiglamene has to stifle a laugh. She’d forgotten, somehow, the thousand little rituals that formed a scaffold around Drearburh’s hollow heart. 

Pelleamena turns to face her fully. Her face is white and smooth as porcelain, the skull paint a delicate tracery of black over her skin. It still stops Aiglamene’s heart. 

She is as pale and remote, and as beautiful, as a star.

“I’ll visit.” Aiglamene manages, as sweat begins to prickle her forehead, her upper lip. “I promise. I’m sorry. The fighting, my leg, it-“

Pelleamena surges forward in a batlike rustle of skirts, and before Aiglamene can protest she has circled a thin, white hand around the narrow bone now protruding from the stump of her leg.

Aiglamene hisses, not in pain so much as the sudden, acute awareness of Pelleamena’s fingers on exposed bone, the connection running to the core of her, the grip that hasn’t been broken by time or distance or blood.

“We prayed for your health.”

Pelleamena’s face is a perfect mask, but her voice is the quiet rasp of someone terribly, desperately alone.

“Every day, we prayed. On our _knees,_ Captain.” Her eyes are alight, the sparking fever-brightness of the very mad or very ill. “Why did you come back?”

She is very close, now. Aiglamene can see the faint lines of pink around her eyes, where the paint can’t reach. She lifts her hand without thinking and brushes it along the brocade edge of Pelleamena’s veil.

“I told you.” Aiglamene trembles as she rests her fingertips on the bone buttons securing Pelleamena’s habit. “I didn’t have a choice.”

Slowly, she lifts the edge of the Reverend Mother’s veil and presses it to her lips. Pelleamena closes her eyes and draws a long, shaking breath before she gets to her feet.

“I never wanted to see you again.” 

Aiglamene is left, beached, on her bed. Alone. 

“I know.”

God, how very deeply she knows it. She closes her own eyes, hopes for sleep. 

Rubs her fingers together to cement the memory of rich fabric on her skin.

She didn’t die when she was supposed to. But she cannot find it in herself to regret it.


	2. A taste of salt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every month, Aiglamene lines up with the faithful to receive the anointing of salt water from the Reverend Father’s own hand. She keeps her eyes fixed on Pelleamena as the coolness drips down her forehead, runs along the side of her nose, and she licks the taste of paint and salt from her lips.

Time passes strangely on the Ninth. Often, it seems to drag, to stretch out endlessly as if the years pressing down on Drearburh and its ancient tomb are piled like dust upon it. 

At other times, however, it seems that though nothing has changed, the days and months have passed in the blink of an eye, the regular cycle of saints’ days and prayers, fasts and bells and ceremonies becoming a blur in the memory. Aiglamene, recovering, finds herself slipping back into that current far more easily than she’s comfortable with. 

Perhaps, though, it’s a blessing. She can never leave again. Her prosthetic has healed badly, bowing under her weight: the nuns explain that they are unused to working with living bone. They offer their apologies, but it cannot be fixed. 

(Sometimes, Aiglamene thinks of Pelleamena’s hand on the new, raw bone of her leg, the way those narrow fingers had gripped with such force.

She does not allow herself to take the thought any further)

Every month, Aiglamene lines up with the faithful to receive the anointing of salt water from the Reverend Father’s own hand. She keeps her eyes fixed on Pelleamena as the coolness drips down her forehead, runs along the side of her nose, and she licks the taste of paint and salt from her lips. 

A year from their first meeting, Pelleamena is waiting for Aiglamene in her cell. 

“My lady.”

Aiglamene kneels, unsteadily, the pain in her hip and knee from the bowing of her prosthetic already setting in. The false leg sticks out awkwardly to the side, and Aiglamene can see Pelleamena’s slight wrinkle of the lip when she looks at it: pride or disgust, she isn’t sure.

“We find ourselves in need of a new personal guard.”

This is news to Aiglamene. The Reverend Mother and Father are usually attended by just their cavalier, and the ubiquitous skeletons. She frowns up at Pelleamena, noting how the strings of knucklebones wound around her fingers dance and twitch incessantly as the other woman worries them.

“I can recommend a few recruits.” Aiglamene says, eventually, cautiously. Pelleamena gives her a flat look, impersonal as the snow now falling I’m miserable grey drifts outside.

“We have a candidate in mind.”

Ah. It’s like that, then. Aiglamene shifts, awkwardly, trying to lever her leg into a more comfortable position.

“My lady- Reverend Mother, I do not mean to question you, but-“

Finger by finger, Pelleamena removes her left glove. She seems wholly focused on this task alone, not meeting Aiglamene’s eyes even when she raises her hand to the other woman’s face.

Carefully, almost methodically, Pelleamena presses her naked thumb into the black of Aiglamene’s painted lips. Her skin tastes of nothing. Not even salt.

Aiglamene dares not even breathe as Pelleamena regards her mouth coolly, a slight wrinkle in her forehead the only sign that they are doing anything more than talking.

Slowly, deliberately, she drags her thumb down to smear Aiglamene’s paint to her chin. Raises her now-black thumb to her own mouth, and presses it to the careful stripes that denote teeth across her lips.

It is not a kiss.

“Then don’t.” She says, matter of factly, crouched in front of Aiglamene to meet her gaze like a supplicant, or even an equal. “You will report to us tomorrow morning, Captain.”

Aiglamene watches Pelleamena’s hand as she wriggles her fingers back into her glove, flexes them, and takes up the bone rosary again.

She bows her head to the Reverend Mother, who rests that now-gloved hand lightly on her hair.

Possessively.

Pelleamena does not tell her to get up.


	3. devotions

They are inseparable after that, as a bodyguard and her charge should be. Aiglamene lopes in Pelleamena’s wake like a wolf, her eyes taking in the shadows of Drearburh all afresh. They are hers, now, and at night she stands outside the door of their chambers and imagines she can hear Pelleamena breathing, shallow but steady, in the dark.

If Priamhark notices the way they slowly settle into orbit, a battered little moon around a pale and icy star, he doesn’t comment. Aiglamene tries to imagine him with his face red and twisted in anger, or panting and slick under Pelleamena’s hand. She can’t. Might as well call the sky her rival, or try and hate the grey and distant sun.

They don’t talk about him when they’re together.

They don’t talk at all.

Pelleamena delivers her benedictions in silence: close and focused as a prayer, the cool knucklebones of her rosary bumping against Aiglamene’s skin as she runs her gloved hand down the other woman’s flank, clever fingers on the raised scars that terminate in her stump. She pulls herself close, the waxy smell of her makeup underlaid with incense and ash, and regards her knight with studied intensity.

Aiglamene struggles, damp and exhausted from waiting for more than just a touch, pinned like a butterfly under her gaze. 

She prays, in those moments, though not to the Tomb or the Emperor. Prays for it to last, for this moment to hold, for the touch to linger.

It never does, of course.

After the children die, it stops completely. 

Aiglamene cannot blame Pelleamena for this. She remembers a battlefield, a blinding, alien sky, a horror that emptied out her guts as she realised that she had been given a test and _failed_.

Just once, she goes to Pelleamena. Offers her a hand.

“My lady. If I can-“

“You _can’t._ ” Pelleamena’s lip curls to reveal yellow teeth and her hand strays to her belly. Aiglamene withdraws as if stung.

“You know I would do anything, if I could.” It’s a stupid, awkward thing to say. Pelleamena gives it the blank regard it deserves.

“Mother...” Aiglamene sounds as helpless as they all feel, after round after round of funerals, tiny bones crammed into new-carved niches.

Pelleamena flinches. 

Gets up.

And, without a word, she walks away.


	4. shall have no dominion

Aiglamene didn’t think she’d feel the absence of the children as keenly as she does. They had always been, simply, _there_ , a swirl of black robes and clumsy paint around her knees, teenaged acolytes bowing awkwardly to mouth prayers they hadn’t caught the rhythm of yet.

She’d thought the Ninth was silent before. Now it is as still and soundless as space. Only the birth of the Reverend Daughter offers some hope. When they kneel at her crib to greet her Aiglamene sees Crux, who had organised the emergency wards and prayed the last rites of the two hundred souls nominally in his charge, weeping. 

There’s only one other child left. 

Aiglamene visits her in the empty crèche, though if asked she couldn’t say why, exactly. Gideon is a squalling, solid little grub with ginger hair scattered thinly about her head and eyes that are an arresting shade of yellow.

Aiglamene reaches down into the cradle and lets a chubby red hand close over her finger.

She knows how Gideon came to be here, of course. It was a difficult event to miss, even if it was followed by the plague. Aiglamene isn’t sure if it’s good or bad that Gideon has survived death twice now, or if it’s even something she should feel anything about. Death will come for Gideon eventually, after all. She’s living on top of a tomb.

Gideon squeezes Aiglamene’s finger and kicks her legs furiously, letting out another long and desperate howl. Aiglamene, unsure of what to do with this, howls right along with her, and this, at last, seems to be what the child needs. 

She falls asleep with Aiglamene still sitting by her crib.

———

Years later, Aiglamene takes the nine times nine steps up to the Reverend Family’s private chambers to visit Pelleamena. The Lady sits enthroned in swathes of black, as if the shadows of the room have coalesced into one living mass. Her face is covered with a heavy veil, no hint of white showing. The air is choked with incense, covering a smell that she can’t quite place, thick and sweet and tangy.

Aiglamene bows but does not kneel. 

“I want to ask a favour.”

Pelleamena is silent under her veil.

“Gideon Nav-“ 

The fabric ripples slightly, a twitch of the head that gives Aiglamene a small thrill of relief. She’s listening, at least.

“My lady, she will never be a nun. Let me train her, keep her out of trouble.” 

Is it her imagination, or does the Reverend Mother sigh? Just a small noise, faint and swiftly smothered.

“Aside from your daughter, she’s the only child we have left. Crux hates her. The others fear her. It won’t do any harm to occupy her days until she realises-“ Aiglamene stops, licks dry, painted lips, looks at the rosary looped like a chain around Pelleamena’s hands- “until she learns she cannot leave.”

Exhaling, Aiglamene studies the veil for any sign of thought, of recognition.

Very slowly, Pelleamena nods. 

Aiglamene cannot smile at her. But she bows her head before she leaves.

(Long after she’s gone, Pelleamena’s skirts split and Harrow crawls out from between her unmoving mother’s legs.)


End file.
